AMD CPU Cooling – Operational Temperature
If I say art imitates life, most of you may agree. If I say cinema imitates life you may agree as well. However if I were to say technology imitates life then you may give me strange looks as if questioning my sanity. I would not be surprised. The reason is, at times technology indeed seems to imitate life. How is this relevant for AMD CPU cooling? I shall explain.
Let us take a small example. If you had been traveling quite some time long under the hot sun what do you experience? You sweat. You feel thirsty. Don't you? The question is why? It is because the temperature of the sun falling on you coupled with the heat generated by your own body for having worked, (working here is the walking) have raised the temperature of your body. The sweating of the body is actually a reflex mechanism inbuilt into our systems. By sweating, the body tries to bring down the temperature to tolerable limits. How is this possible? When you sweat, tiny droplets of the water come out through the invisible pores all over your body. The water so accumulated over the body slowly begins to evaporate bringing down your body temperature in the process.
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Now I will explain my statement that 'technology indeed seems to imitate life' by taking the example of the Central Processing Unit (CPU) of a computer. CPU as we all know is the core of any computer and by virtue of its importance is called the 'brain' of the computer. The fact that we all should appreciate is, just like the human body, CPUs also generate heat. In the case of humans, we saw that we feel thirsty; we sweat. In the case of CPUs, if they get heated there are two possibilities:
The CPU may start to run slowly
The CPU may crash or may even be permanently damaged Thus temperature rise play an important role in the functioning of the CPU. Out of the above two possibilities, the second one is likely to happen in the case of AMD CPUs if the CPU is overheated. Overheated? Yes. Every CPU, whether it be AMD CPU or otherwise, has what is referred to as 'maximum operating temperature' up to which the CPU will not be affected adversely. If the temperature crosses, the maximum operating temperature, then the possibility of the occurrence of any one of the possibilities mentioned above becomes inevitable. It is for this reason that all CPUs including AMD CPUs come with built-in fans, to keep the temperature under control. This brings us to another related question. What is the temperature that AMD CPUs can tolerate? This is a difficult question to answer because different CPUs have different maximum operating temperatures. For instance, AMD Opteron has a maximum operating temperature of 69oC to 70oC, whereas Athlon 64 X2 (dual core) has a maximum operating temperature of 65oC. Therefore, the best way would be to look for the same in the technical specifications literature or documentation which comes along with the product. If the AMD CPU's temperature is nearing the maximum operational temperature, then how do we bring down the temperature of the AMD CPU? There are two options - AMD CPU cooling or Case cooling. In Case cooling, the case or the compartment which houses the CPU is further cooled. In CPU cooling the CPU itself is cooled. The former has its advantages because, in the first place apart from cooling the AMD CPU it also cools the other components such as the motherboard and graphics card too. Secondly, CPU coolers are comparatively costlier than that of Case cooling which can be done by adding another fan in addition to the already existing one.
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